2026 is already here, and many Magento e-commerce businesses are continuing to brainstorm on their strategies in the new year. So much has already been said about AI adoption, bespoke support services, and rocket-fast mobile-first websites, but how to achieve it all, not on paper but in reality, is still a question. Nevertheless, keeping up with 2026 e-commerce trends is completely possible – what you need is the right set of solutions, instruments, and professional assistance.
To help you make your Magento website competitive in the new year and beyond, we spoke to Stefan Chorbanov, the founder of Stenik Group, an e-commerce technology company that has been helping brands succeed with Magento for more than 20 years. Stenik is an early believer and adopter of Hyvӓ and is the first Balkan company to be an Adobe Solution Bronze Partner and yet the only Hyvä Silver Partner in Bulgaria.
Mobile commerce is expected to continue dominating in 2026. What are the most common challenges you still see in merchants’ mobile experience?
Switching to a mobile-first mindset remains difficult for both content managers, mid-level employees, and stakeholders. They often prefer to work on and approve designs or concepts on large desktop resolutions. Marketers, however, see exactly where the conversions are happening and are "on our side," helping us educate clients to always prioritize the mobile experience. That said, it’s important to remember that there are significant differences between industries.
How do you help your clients create mobile-first, seamless shopping experiences, particularly with Hyvӓ’s lightweight frontend framework?
Beyond the technical benefits, Hyvӓ helps because of the philosophy behind it. Once a merchant decides to go down this path, it’s much easier to discourage them from endless "exotic" UI/UX customizations by reminding them why they chose Hyvӓ in the first place: simplicity and speed.
How do Magento solutions and Hyvӓ address the growing demand for faster loading times, simplified user interfaces, and streamlined mobile experiences?
For simpler projects, Hyvӓ solves many issues almost out of the box. However, heavy customizations that deviate significantly from the default theme can compromise performance. This is where the developer’s expertise and long-term thinking come in.
This is where the expertise and long-term thinking of the developers on the respective project come in. As far as we are aware, certain standards are also planned for higher-level partners in the Hyvӓ ecosystem, and we think this is a good thing because we should not forget what the main pillars of Hyvӓ are: simplicity and speed.
What specific optimizations or features in the Hyvӓ theme make it stand out for mobile-first design compared to traditional Magento themes?
We have never been fans of ready-to-use Magento themes, even back in the Magento 1 days. We view Hyvӓ as a skeleton to build upon, not just a standalone theme. After gaining significant experience in the last 3 years, we plan to release our own set of tools in 2026 – our own interpretation of Hyvӓ, packaged as an "accelerator" solution. We believe that in the vast Magento ecosystem, where too much freedom can sometimes be a challenge, packaging valuable features in an almost ready-to-go solution can bring more focus and quality for merchants.
Do you think mobile commerce will eventually replace desktops entirely for most industries?
We don't think so. There are industries where the consideration phase happens on mobile, but the actual purchase happens on desktop. In others, research happens on a desktop, but the purchase is made offline. Generally, consumers now have so many touchpoints before a purchase – even for impulsive buys – that the mix is becoming difficult to track. We doubt desktop versions will disappear, just as we don't believe mobile apps will fully replace mobile sites, even though certain industries are seeing both trends happen.
What Magento extensions or Hyvӓ theme capabilities are essential to creating a seamless experience for your clients?
To make the answer as specific as possible, we can list our most used modules in Hyvӓ projects from the Amasty portfolio (and in general). These are Shop by Brand, Automatic Related Products, and Free Gift. Of course, the list is much longer, but we should not forget that some of the extensions are more related to the back end.
Amasty Products for Seamless Shopping Experiences
All Hyvӓ-compatible by default
Can you share some best practices for integrating Hyvä into Magento 2 stores while ensuring SEO, especially for large-scale e-commerce sites?
As we know, Hyvӓ improves performance for large catalogs by removing Magento’s frontend bottlenecks – its lightweight CSS/JS and minimal architecture make category and product listing pages render much faster, improving Core Web Vitals as well. However, Hyvӓ is not a magic pill – many performance issues in +100K product stores come from the backend (slow queries, indexing, caching, or search). We address this by combining Hyvӓ as a clean frontend foundation with backend optimizations, extension choices, and server configuration to ensure a consistently fast user experience.
What are the key Hyvӓ customizations you can implement while ensuring that site performance doesn’t get compromised?
The list is long, but just to point out something specific, we can give an example with the checkout process customization. In our local market, delivery companies use specific address nomenclatures and don't use postal codes the way the rest of the world does. This imposes different user journey challenges related to checkout and the address books of the user profile. To solve this problem, we successfully customized Hyvӓ without affecting the website speed, but adapting the default format to the local peculiarities and requirements.
How does Hyvӓ Theme address the growing importance of Progressive Web Apps and headless commerce for modern e-commerce websites?
We were not big believers in PWAs when they came out, and were also not big fans of headless commerce, despite its popularity in recent years. Yet, there is a Bulgarian proverb, “For every train there are passengers out there”, which can be said about headless architectures. As for now, especially with the adoption of Hyvӓ, we have hardly faced any challenges in our projects that we cannot solve in the current setup. We have some clients who would use a headless CMS successfully, but from what we see now, Hyvӓ Commerce does content management not worse. That is why we are very happy with the development of our ecosystem.
What are some of the most common challenges merchants face when migrating to Hyvӓ?
In our early migrations, the challenge was finding compatible extensions to replace the old set. Today, thanks to the dedication of Amasty and other vendors, this problem is solved, and our focus has shifted to the checkout, where we use our own in-house developments rather than third-party modules. However, these are more technological challenges that marketers don't have to worry about when they have a quality solution partner.
The biggest hurdle for merchants is understanding the long-term value of the investment, especially if their current numbers look good. We are proud that our long-term partnerships have allowed us to migrate nearly 30% of our clients to Hyvӓ in under three years, and we expect this trend to continue through 2026.
Omnichannel experiences are also one of the 2026 trends. What challenges do merchants face when trying to create a seamless omnichannel experience?
Technological challenges are still the biggest problem when it comes to omnichannel experiences. For established offline retailers, their existing tech stack can be very limiting and may not allow for deep synchronization between the online store and offline systems. A common case is the difficulty of digitizing a loyalty program, which might require a total rethink of the strategy or even replacing the loyalty software or ERP system entirely.
Our solutions range from developing complex custom functionalities to bypassing back-office limitations to providing full-scale consulting on changing internal software. Just to point out something more specific – we can give an example with typical а "Click & Collect" challenges. They are logistics and storage – not every physical store has the space to store numerous pending parcels, especially if it is in a shopping mall. Another one is the “internal conflict" – online customers picking up orders don't always generate extra offline revenue, but do take up staff time. We solve this by training merchants on best practices to ensure an omnichannel experience where all parties are satisfied.
It is also interesting to mention that in B2B, there are even more challenges, because these businesses usually are not so client-facing.
How are consumer expectations around convenience (same-day delivery, instant support, mobile-first design) shaping your project strategies?
Local market characteristics play a vital role here, and we constantly remind our clients of this, as most of them are local merchants in the Bulgarian market. This market is becoming increasingly attractive to large European and international players. Because of this, local merchants must clearly highlight their "home-field" advantages to win consumer trust. In this sense, same-day delivery and instant phone support in the local language are two very key USPs.
AI in e-commerce is predicted to become even more widespread in 2026. How fast does your agency embed AI into the business processes of your customers?
Since our projects are characterized by medium to high complexity and involve significant technical challenges, almost all the AI solutions we use are third-party. What we do, however, is help the developers of these solutions adapt them for Magento, and in some cases, specifically for our unique clients. This is a proven approach for us – one we’ve previously used with delivery companies and payment systems – because standard, "out-of-the-box" official extensions often don’t perform well enough for complex needs.
Are your clients adopting AI as a cost-saving measure or as a way to enhance customer lifetime value?
Based on our advice, our clients have begun implementing AI bit by bit in a gradual process that starts with customer service and flows toward increasing sales. This phased approach ensures we begin with the easiest solutions to implement first. In practice, true "shopping assistants" can be quite complex in terms of configuration, regulations, and tracking. Therefore, we’ve adopted a more conservative but structured approach, which is currently delivering very strong results.
If you could give one piece of advice to merchants preparing for the next five years of e-commerce transformation, what would it be?
While the most logical answer right now is expected to mention "AI", our vote goes to "team". The big difference between mediocre and successful merchants, beyond the fundamentals (product, price, brand, etc.), is the focus and the quality of the team. Since we can't leave out AI, we should mention that it is very important for merchants to realize the following: to implement AI the right way, the structure of the data provided for each AI-driven/supported process is important. And this can't happen without structured processes and a professional, focused team.
